Well. What an interesting few days. After all their egg laying and nest building, resulting in the deepest nest I’ve ever seen, they’ve started building a second nest about three feet away from the first.

Here’s the original nest:

Here’s the new nest:

We don’t know at this point whether they’ve abandoned the first nest in favor of the second, or if this is a new pair. Barn Swallows are happy to nest in colonies, but we’ve never had more than one set at a time so that would be new if that were the case. My gut tells me they have abandoned the first nest.

Why would they abandon a nest? Well, we’ve considered several reasons. It may be due to us. Even though we only checked their nest once each day that may have been too much for them. If that were the case, though, we doubt they’d have built a new nest just a few feet away. They’d have probably moved to a different neighborhood entirely, so to speak.

Another possibility is they just couldn’t get that nest the way they wanted it. As we’ve mentioned, they continued to add depth and feathers and other materials and they just may have not been happy with it. They built two nests last year, but they started on the second one before laying eggs in the first.

We will probably never know their reasoning, but we do know we’ll be following along closely. Just not quite as closely as we had been!